Happy Friday! We found lots of great gamification, customer loyalty and social media news for you this week. Catch up on our favorite links in this weeks gamification news roundup below!
Learn To Code, Get A Job: Treehouse Offers Free Courses To 2,500 College Students TechCrunch 9/14/2012 Portland based Treehouse is building an educational platform to help aspiring programmers and developers learn the trade. Using videos, quizzes and gamification, Treehouse is hoping to educate anyone interested in code from complete beginners to advanced developers. This week they announced that they will be giving 2,500 ‘scholarships’ of free access to their platform to college students across the country. Students will get 2 years access to their “gold” accounts, which includes 550+ videos, a real time practice engine and feedback on user projects.
Playing the business game The StarPhoenix 9/11/2012 We don’t normally focus much on enterprise gamification solutions, but we thought this was worth a mention. A new training tool for sales teams is being released called Quota, aimed at turning what is typically a boring training process into a fun collaborative training experience. The platform uses interactive seminars alongside game mechanics and game thinking to make sales team training more fun and engaging. George Anastasopoulos says of the Quota platform, “Fun may sound like a wishy-washy and unscientific factor in business, but at the end of the day, when it comes to learning, fun is an absolutely vital variable,”.
Tracking down the music with digital Dylan DW 9/10/2012 It is awesome to see someone who has been in the music industry for so long embracing a new technology like gamification. Bob Dylan is promoting his new album ‘Tempest’ through a mobile app called Sound Graffiti. The app unlocks random selections from the new album when users have hit a targeted location. One hundred locations around the world have been set up to unlock various songs through the app. This is an interesting marriage of gamification, location based services and the music industry, we can’t wait to see how this turns out!
Using Digital Coupons to Increase Engagement and Loyalty 1to1 Media 9/12/2012 At BigDoor we believe tangible rewards are a great way to help build customer loyalty. Those rewards don’t have to be expensive, and even coupons, discount codes and other sales type offers are beneficial. 1to1 Media agrees with us, acknowledging that digital coupons are a great way to create social benefit, as well as track users use of coupons you are providing and build customer engagement and loyalty. We hope to see this trend get more acknowledgment as time goes on.